THE POSITION OF BRITISH INDIANS.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXI, Issue 12062, 5 January 1907, Page 4

THE POSITION OF BRITISH INDIANS.

We have been educating India in European learning and in European ways of feeling and of thought for long years. We have met in some directions — not all of them the most profitable or desirable directions — with a great measure of success. We have created a class which is as yet relatively small in numbers, but which possesses great and growing influence, of high-cultivated men, upon whom we have been inculcating at school and in college the glories of British citizenship and their privilege to share its rights. That, we have explained to them, is a part of the return they receive for the submission they made and for the taxes they pay to rulers who are not of their own blood. It is a grave matter to be obliged to unsay, or at any rate to qualify, very materially, our own teaching on this head. But it is more politic, a3 well as more honest (remarks the London Times), to make this avowal ourselves than to leave our Indian fellowsubjects to discovery that the doctrines which they have heard from professorial and official lips are in fact unreal. That is what they do discover by the proof of a humiliating experience when they go to our colonies and find that under the British flag — the flag we invite them to regard as their own — they may stand on, the same footing as alien Asiatics. The discovery, which is actually formulated in the resolutions adopted by the British Indians of Johannesburg, when the Ordinance was passed, is particularly mischievous, because it comes home to wide sections of the Indian peoples/ whom the alleged political grievances, which form the stock-in-trade of the educated agitator, affect not at all. The emigrants who make

it in their own persons include large numbers of poor men — pedlars, email traders, shopkeepers, and coolies — who neither know nor care anything about politics when they are at home. But each of these men, when he goes back to Indian, spreads abroad about his own village and amongst his own neighbours his account of the treatment which he has met with at the hands of British colonists, without interference or protection from the British raj. A more dangerous body of missionaries of discontent can hardly be imagined, and they must increase in number and in influence with the spread of education and of travel. This conflict of rights and of interests is naturally and necessarily inflaming passions and prejudices in the colonies and in India, which sap and blast the Imperial patriotism that must bind the Empire together, if the Empire is to last. How is the conflict to be adjusted? How arc the passions to be assuaged? How is the growing mischief they are doing to be stayed? That is one of the many large and vital internal problems which the organic growth of the Eknpire coiif routs us. .t cannot be evaded or deferred, and the coming Colonial Conference may afford our statesmen, if they are ready, an opportunity for discussing it in all seriousness with the responsible leaders of colonial opinion.